Irrationality vs vaccines: Fighting for reality

By Chris Mooney

Three books investigate how so many people have become so dangerously irrational about vaccines – part of a general confusion between fact and belief

AT FIRST it may seem strange that a media reporter penned The Panic Virus, an essential new book about the modern anti-vaccination movement and its scientific poverty. Seth Mnookin’s first book, Hard News (Random House, 2004), was about journalistic scandals at The New York Times. So what is he doing in the test-tube-strewn space of the vaccine war?

As he tells it, Mnookin was annoyed by the clueless intellectuals he encountered at New …

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